Mobile gaming in all of its many forms has taken off in recent years. For a full generation before this latest explosion in mobile gaming, desktop or big screen gaming was the most popular form of individual gaming. Now, desktop or big screen gaming is fast becoming second best in all demographics.

These two phenomena have taken together. That mobile gaming is overtaking desktop or big screen gaming and that it is happening across all demographics, means that there is something inherently unique in mobile gaming that men and women, young and old, white and black, rich and poor, working class or white class, high school educated or college educated, are all flocking to it.

By gaming, we mean all games, whether we had to buy them, they were a free download, or if we mean casino gaming for money.

Time Filler

Playing games has always been a major time filler. Even when the overwhelming majority of people lived subsistence lives, they somehow found the time to play games. Playing games actually is as natural as life itself. M. Scott Peck, the famed author of The Road Less Travelled, wrote that we should observe children at play because that is basically what children do all day. Of course, they cry and eat and sleep but their existence essentially spins around the word “play”.

As adults, we work. We yearn for play. We don’t see work as a pleasant way to pass the time. We see work as a necessary way to earn enough money to buy all the things we need to live and to buy the activities that we will do to pass the time. Robert M. Pirsig wrote in his landmark novel cum philosophy book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that we all need to find the play in our work lest the work itself overwhelm us with routine leading to abject boredom.

The famed classic games like checkers, chess, go and others are thousands of years old. Yet, we never stop inventing new games. Every year a single new game is named Game of the Year for good reason. We need them.

Convenience

Mobile telephones were only just recently too expensive for the average person to own one. Today, in established or developed countries, almost every adult has a mobile phone. The technology has improved so rapidly that we no longer can suffice in calling them mobile phones; they have to be called smartphones because they are indeed extremely “smart”. Our language has adapted to the changes that smartphones have wrought. We call the software that we can download to our phones “apps” which was once the long “cumbersome” word applications.

There are thousands of apps available to anyone with a smartphone. Many people have so many apps that they gladly upgrade to a more powerful phone whenever a new one comes out on the platform they prefer.

Apps are so plentiful and varied that we often refer to our phone and access the app we need to gather information and make decisions. Apps tell us the best route to take if we are traveling by car, where the best deals are for the big-ticket items we want to buy, and much more bits of information, large and small.

So it’s no wonder that the massive convenience of smartphones has filtered into the realm of gaming.

Marrying Time to Convenience

Thus, the desire to have an enjoyable way to fill our time coupled with the extraordinary convenience of mobile technology means that many people are likely to choose to play a game on mobile. This does not preclude playing at home on one’s desktop. At this stage of the discussion, it simply means that people will use their mobile device to play games while they are waiting somewhere, on their lunch break, or any time they have a free few minutes.

The commute to and from work was once reserved for sleeping or reading a book or the newspaper. Laptop computers meant that we had to work during the commute. Mobile technology means that we can still read or sleep but we can also listen to music or play games. By stating that mobile gaming has surpassed desktop gaming does not mean that it has surpassed reading, listening to music, or working.

It has, of course, far surpassed reading!

Technology Means Graphics

Anyone who has ever browsed in a used bookstore has opened a book that seemed interesting but returned the book to the shelf when they saw the old-fashioned print therein.

Mobile games were once in a similar bind. People might have wanted to play a game on their device but they gave up quickly: the graphics were simply not good enough. That began to change in the early part of this decade and continues to change for the better with every new generation of smartphone and tablet.

So, now we can access a game on our super-sophisticated mobile device and enjoy playing without feeling eye strain or simply becoming frustrated by inferior graphics. This permeates all gaming venues from the fun and free games we all have played many times to the casino games and especially the slots we can play on mobile.

In fact, mobile gaming is very popular even among people who are not generally considered online casino gamblers. That’s because casino games take mere seconds to complete. Each game is a short interlude. So, if you have just a few minutes, you might opt for a few spins of the slots reels in an entertaining slots game.

Whatever your gaming choice, mobile technology now makes it the go-to platform even when we get home; we slouch on the couch and play. In this context, slouching is a modern, wealthy person’s (in historical terms) way of saying that we have earned our keep and can afford to relax in the most pleasurable manner.